Solving the Florida Monkey Mystery

From Tarzan to Today: How Hollywood and Nature Collide at Silver Springs and Fort De Soto

If you’re looking for the real Hollywood monkey connection in Florida, the actual stars—those famous Rhesus Macaques from the old Tarzan films—live up near Silver Springs, outside Ocala.

Back in the 1930s, a film crew brought in a bunch of macaques from Southeast Asia to make the springs look like an “African jungle.” They let the monkeys loose on an island, and honestly, the animals just took off from there. Now, their wild descendants are a quirky tourist attraction, and the Silver Springs movie connection is the real deal.

Olympic swimmer Johnny Weissmuller swung through the jungle of Silver Springs as Hollywood’s Tarzan circa 1930s

Fort De Soto, on the other hand, has its own wild monkeys. People love to say they’re related to the Tarzan bunch, or that someone released them to chase that Hollywood vibe. Truth is, no one’s totally sure where they came from. Maybe they’re distant cousins of the Silver Springs group, or maybe they showed up through some other wild Florida twist. You can find them hanging around Long Mullet Key, charming visitors (and sometimes stealing snacks), but their backstory is more of a local legend than a blockbuster.

And get this—Florida has even more monkey drama. Down near Fort Lauderdale Airport, you’ve got vervet monkeys that escaped from a zoo in the 1940s. Then there are squirrel monkeys that popped up from other oddball introductions. The state’s a real jungle, but not always the Hollywood kind.

If you want to spot the original movie monkeys, head to Silver Springs. Fort De Soto’s macaques are their own story, famous in their own right, just often mixed up with the Tarzan crowd.